J.P. Morgan said its digital token now handles $1 billion in daily transactions.

“JPM Coin gets transacted on a daily basis mostly in U.S. dollars, but we again intend to continue to expand that,” Global Head of Payments Takis Georgakopoulos told Bloomberg in an interview Thursday (Oct. 26).

JPM Coin lets the banking giant’s wholesale clients make dollar and euro payments over a private blockchain network. The $1 billion figure is dwarfed by the $10 trillion in U.S. dollar transactions moving in and out of J.P. Morgan each day, per the report.

The bank also runs a blockchain-based repo application and is mulling a digital deposit token to speed cross-border settlements, the report said.

On the latter, Georgakopoulos said in the report the “next step in that journey is to think about how you can create a more retail version of that, so that you can bring that same efficiency to consumers.”

J.P. Morgan became the first major U.S. bank to introduce its own digital token for real-world use in 2019, saying the blockchain-based cryptocurrency was created to allow for “the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts.”

Earlier this year, J.P. Morgan said it was committed to tokenizing traditional finance after processing — as of April — close to $700 billion in short-term loan transactions through Onyx, a permissioned version of the Ethereum blockchain.

“We think that tokenization is a killer app for traditional finance,” Onyx program head Tyrone Lobban said at the time. “If you think about private markets — private credit, private equity and private real estate — they are pretty much double the size of public markets, but many orders of magnitude less liquid, so there’s this huge disparity.”

Meanwhile, blockchain is continuing to be embraced by mainstream and traditional financial players.

“The true intrinsic value of blockchain, which is around programmability of transactions, immutability of transactions, and the ability to do delivery versus payment and always-on types of payments, has yet to be unlocked,” Mastercard Chief Digital Officer Jorn Lambert said in an interview with PYMNTS posted in July.

“There’s a huge global trend going on right now into exploring the intricacies, complexities, difficulties and benefits of leveraging the properties of [distributed ledger technology (DLT)] for the financial system,” Daniel Field, global head of blockchain at UST, told PYMNTS the same month.

Source : PYMNTS.com / October 26, 2023